A question about opposites....sorry, english is not my mother tounge...?

Question

My second question is about opposites. I hear many people say that to have peace on must have war, cold - heat, etc.But I was wondering who defines opposites but ourselves. Arent opposites defined by our own limitation and what are opposites but two sides of the same coin. like cold a lesser form of heat. So who says opposites need each other? the universe we live in is a dynamic one, so opposites are understood through variations of intensity, like different levels of frequencys. So who can say there are two set of opposites that need each other to exist? who says that it is not more like a circle where there are no bounderies, we define the bounderies? I understand that to know cold one needs heat, but where does heat end and cold start?
good and bad, are they not the result of each other? if one has no good, one has no bad, so peace is a reaction of war, or rather peace is war made less intense? could the concept or abstract of good and bad be destroyed, and would that not be peace

Answer 1

I lost you on your first line .....

Answer 2

Great question... Star!!

Your English is in fact very good..... congrats!

I totally agree with what you are saying.... of course opposites are just two parts of a continuum, which look opposite if we view from a point in between the two. It is our definition of a neutrality or normality that gives rise to the concept of opposites...... everything is relative, our entire knowledge arises from relativity and comparison of our various perceptions like seeing, hearing, touching, smelling etc. Unless we can correlate, we can not differentiate and unless we can differentiate, there would be no knowledge. The reason for this lies in the principle governing this universe..... namely, that there is a difference in each similarity and a similarity in each difference.... every single thing is unique and no two things are absolutely different in every respect. The simultaneous presence of commonality and uniqueness means that opposites is a mere concept to highlight extreme difference in degree as you have so well illustrated through apt examples.
Therefore, I further agree that there is certainly no need to have an escalated war in order to establish peace... in fact it is a dangerously misconceived idea, the sooner we discard it, the better in today's high-tech world capable of unimaginable destruction!!

Answer 3

I feel the uniserve revolves around a few fundamental principles like Cause & Effect, Action & Reaction etc. These fundamentals are not the opposites. It is we who, for want of any other explanation , term these as opposites

For me a simple thing is the rise of the fall of the ocean waves. Rise & fall . So long as the universal principle of gravity applies a rising wave will fall..

Similar will be the explanations for any , in this world.If the increase in population CAUSES the expansion of the humans into the lands of the free roaming animals the EFFCET will be a war between the two. Once a semblemse of balance is restored these the equilibrium whci we call peace..

Answer 4

Very few, if any, opposites exist in nature.

We cannot, for example, measure cold. We can only measure heat. If something is "hot" we describe it so only because it is outside the range of human comfort. Same for cold. But in reality, there is only "temperature", a measure of the relative molecular motion of a substance.

Are such concepts as "peace" and "war" truly opposite? I doubt it. We define peace as the absence of war, but that definition is circular. There are many other states of human relations that are not war, but may hardly be called peace.

The opposite of war likely is the overt love of one people for another, something this world has probably never seen.

For every quality you can imagine, there may well be a state of perfect absence and a state of perfect presence. Very likely, the range of human comfort for that quality is somewhere on the continuum. Just as too much of a thing is bad, so is too little. We call the extremes opposites, but that is only a failure of language, not a fact of reality.

Answer 5

:) i agree with a lot of what you say, but prehaps not all. Yes, most opposites are/contain the other opposite. For example, a magnent, north and south, but they are both part of the magnent, also happiness and unhappiness, both just degrees of a same feeling. But war and peace.... One might compare that to dark and light. Darkness, or peace, might be the absence of the other, light or war. :) i think good and bad could be erased to one's perspective, as i know mine has dimished quite a bit.

But also, cold and hot, just different temperatures. But they're just words ;) You could do what you seem to propose and just say hot is 999999999999999999999999 degrees celcius, making no one hot! But just because you changed the definition of a word (hot), doesn't mean you changed anything. 90 degrees F would still seem like 80 degrees F today :P

Answer 6

I agree with most of your logic. Opposites are often subjective, therefore open to each individuals interpretation. For example, what is the opposite of a large mirror? Would it be a small mirror? Maybe the mirror's reflection? Or you could say the opposite of a large mirror is no mirror at all. This is a rather abstract topic when you think about it, and is rather thought-provoking.

Tu scrivi inglese molto bene anche. Io so un po' d'italiano. Imparo la lingua tutti i giorni!

Answer 7

What you are describing is Taoism, or the whole yin yang philosophy of Asia. I don't really follow that belief myself. I don't think (like they do in China) that when you want to cool off in Summer you should drink hot tea! (yes, we were constantly told that...give me ice water any day, LOL) In any case, you should ask that question to some Taoists.

Many people do say that to have peace you must have war...that is just practical experience, not philosophy. In order to live a peaceful life, sometimes you have to kill those who would wipe you out if they had the chance. Sad, but true.